Pagan Temples, Christians, and Demons in the Late Antique East and West
Sacris Erudiri, (2015)DOI: 10.1484/J.SE.5.109681
Zusammenfassung
In Late Antiquity Christian attitudes toward pagan shrines in diverse parts of the Mediterranean differed. In the East several temples were destroyed or transformed into churches, whereas in the West they were just abandoned at the end of the fourth century and remained closed during the next two hundred years. These contrasting attitudes have been explained by scholars on political, economic, and civic grounds. This article aims at demonstrating that religious motifs mattered as well, and the practical attitudes toward pagan shrines were influenced by the fact that in the East several temples were considered to be real dwellings of demons. This view on temples derived from an old tradition, absent from the West, of representing shrines as places of actual encounters with gods, from the spectacular way in which some temples functioned in Late Antiquity, and from some specific traits of eastern monasticism.